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Crossing the Yuba River near the Pacific Crest Trail in Northern California.

Why don’t I just write the story? Why didn’t I just report each day’s journey? Why can’t the words come out straightforward?

I don’t even remember when I wrote this. Presumably it took shape some time in the past month, as I’ve done something akin to settling into a new home, while I’ve dragged out my move from Los Angeles to Portland, moving no longer across hundreds of miles and instead creeping slowly, randomly across my new home town.

For weeks I’ve been plotting maps, tweaking Google Earth settings, uploading and arranging photo slideshows, transcribing audio, adjusting WordPress themes, reinstalling broken databases, sorting notes, scrawling in journals, browsing help forums, maintaining computer files, arranging furniture, pitching stories, visiting labs, reporting, attending meetings, filing emails, postponing responses, mailing postcards, paying bills, signing leases, opening boxes and otherwise transitioning through life, both digesting and avoiding my recollection of my journey from Los Angeles to Portland.

It has been a mixed blessing. Sometimes I kick myself for not writing enough, not writing when the trip was fresh, not writing soon enough, early enough. Other times I realize something that K.C. Cole told my class of science writers at USC on more than one occasion, something I found incredibly encouraging. “Even when you’re not writing,” she’d say, “You’re writing.”

I wonder what I’ve written as I’ve not been writing, and as I’ve fretted each day about losing the memories that so recently burned themselves into me, that brought me, simply, from there to here. I don’t want to wonder about it too much, though, lest I get caught up in the pointless tedium of writing and reading about writing.

What I can recall distinctly is a sentiment I felt somewhere between Lassen and Modoc counties, when I emerged from a forest to see sunlight like I’d never seen before swirling across the tree tops. Then, I uttered the following into the digital voice recorder I babbled at throughout my journey:

I don’t know how quite to describe what I’m seeing and what I’m passing through and how to record it for permanence. I don’t know quite how to capture the sense of the sun on the line of trees up high with the trees still in shadow beneath, the changing landscape from thick fog and patches of snow to only small patches of snow and these, what I think are lava beds, pouring over the side now in a landscape becoming more rough bit by bit. I don’t know how to keep describing everything that I’m seeing, the complete emptiness of it all, the complete soloness of my drive at this moment.

I guess what I’ve written is what you see here. What I’ve produced is what you’ve found. What I’ve created is in front of you and, quite possibly, it is changing just as quickly, just as astoundingly as the light shifting and scattering and spreading across those treetops in a faraway corner of California.

Continue reading “LAX to PDX: The Back Way”